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I am a college student, and my parents are hours away. So last time I went home, I upgraded my mom's computer to Windows 7, and also installed Hamachi to it so that it's in a VPN with my laptop.

Well now my mom has gotten some spyware and/or viruses. I didn't install any sort of remote control software, and it's Windows 7 Home Basic (or maybe premium) so I can't remote desktop to it, but the Hamachi connection gives me a direct, non-firewalled, always-on link to the computer.

What is the best course of action? Can you recommend the best remote control software, given that I don't need any firewall traversal or anything since Hamachi handles that? I'd also love suggestions for what anti-virus/anti-spyware program to use, especially if there's something that would work particularly well in this situation, but otherwise I can do research on my own and figure it out.

Also, my mom is not very good at following instructions over the phone when it comes to computer stuff (a button will be right in front of her and she won't notice it) so anything I have her do needs to be simple.

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Teamviewer is not dedicated to be used through VPN but even your mom should figure out how to double click the exe, accepting the UAC prompt and give you the two code ...

For the virus part you should look at this question: What to do if my computer is infected by a virus or a malware?

My personnal free anti-virus recomendation are Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool, Avira & Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware

Use minimum two of them and after use System Explorer to inspect the system: process, startup, services... And check the suspicious files with Virus Total, Virus Jotti or its own database

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Teamviewer link

Have your mom just go to that website, click the "download now, its free", and install. She can just give you the access number and code from the program and you can do the rest. Play with the software so you can talk her through it. Its only a few steps to follow.

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Have you tried alternatives to Remote Desktop, such as Copilot? Copilot must be running on both computers, but it is very easy to use.

As for searching for spyware, I'd normally use Ad-Aware and Spybot. There's another question with recommendations for (free) anti-virus software.

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The best Remote control software for a quick fix, or even a long fix is Ammyy. It takes 4 seconds to get it going. Also the best antiVirus software, like fluxtendu said, is MalwareBytes

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I probably would agree regarding TeamViewer as the best option to access remote computer. Make sure you send her a link to the "Quick Support" version. That way there is no need to install anything. Simply run .exe give 2 codes and you are good to go.

Regarding removing actual infection, for general instructions check here. The only thing is, if you are accessing computer remotely, you will have to use safe mode with networking instead of safe mode.

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